Industrial Livestock

The industrial meat and dairy sector emits more greenhouse gas than the entire transportation sector, while often relying on forced farm and slaughterhouse labor and draconian contracts for farmers. IATP has, for the first time, assigned greenhouse gas footprints directly to the corporations responsible. We are building a global coalition to hold these companies accountable to climate, food safety and human rights standards.

Josh talks with Steve Suppan about meat inspection in the United States and proposed rule change that would allow companies to do self-inspection, potentially leading to higher line speeds and greater safety concerns in an industry that already has a history of unsafe conditions.

In January, the Food Safety Inspection Service proposed a rule to allow plant management to determine production line speed and configuration in swine slaughterhouses. IATP wrote a letter advising FSIS not to finalize the rule, particularly if enforcement failures and reporting shortcomings continued.

While global agribusiness giants such as Monsanto, Cargill, Bayer and DuPont are best known for their control over the global seeds, cereals and agrochemicals market, symbolizing the corporate takeover of the food system, an extremely powerful segment of agribusiness remains hidden from public scrutiny: The companies that control the production, processing and trad

On January 30, IATP continued its webinar series focused on The Rise of Big Meat. This episode, entitled Corporate Crimes and Campaigns to Stop Them, focused on civil society responses to the human rights violations committed by meat companies such as JBS and BRF.

In early 2014, IATP released its first series of in-depth reports about the global meat industry. That series, the Global Meat Complex: The China Series, examined China’s path to becoming one of the biggest producers of pork, poultry and dairy and the biggest importer of soy.

IATP, FASE, and The Heinrich Boell Foundation recently released a report on the industrial meat complex in Brazil. Besides the massive government corruption and environmental destruction, the human rights abuses in the supply chain are both well-documented and abundant.